New civil service pay remit guidance: a disgrace

Pay for public services has been a long-running campaign theme for us Prospect, with 12 years of real-terms pay cuts having a crippling effect on living standards.

As part of our campaign, thousands of you signed our petition, launched earlier this year, to fix broken pay systems. Hundreds of MPs have been contacted by constituents using our tool to call for their support for fair pay for public servants.

Our general secretary Mike Clancy recently met with the minister for the Cabinet Office, alongside the General Secretaries of PCS and the FDA, where again we were able to press for a fair deal for our members working in the civil service and wider public sector.

The president of our public services sector Geoff Fletcher and I also met face to face with the Cabinet Office to press home our arguments about the need to start protecting the living standards of those covered by the remit guidance and beyond. More broadly, we were pushing for a fix to broken pay systems by developing progression systems that reward knowledge, skills and experience.

The Cabinet Office has now issued its remit guidance which sets the framework for pay negotiations at employer level. The guidance proposes headline increases limited to 2-3%. Quite simply, that is a disgrace.

Our members will be angry. Employers will read it askance given the challenges they face.

The failure to even mention inflation and what is happening with earnings in the broader economy beggars belief and it will be rightly seen as either arrogant indifference or active cowardice to face up to what is happening in the wider economy and its impact on our members and the organisations they work for.

What’s next?

As a union, we will be putting pressure on employers to stretch every sinew to seek to protect the living standards of staff in real terms through consolidated and pensionable increases. Where that objective cannot be fully met through fully consolidated increases, non-consolidated bonus pots should be used to maximise the in-year pay increases for all staff.

We will also be pressing employers to submit pay flexibility business cases and we as the trade union, should be integral to the development of those cases.

We represent tens of thousands of members right across the public services sector, and we will co-ordinate our activity so no branch feels alone and none of our members feel left behind.

This year’s remit guidance is a prime example of the need for an independent pay review body. There is a common recognition both centrally, and at employer level that pay systems are broken.

MPs have received a 28% pay rise in the time that public servants have received less than half that. How MPs can advocate lower pay increases for the staff who serve them than they themselves have received is beyond hypocritical.

Our campaign for fair pay and fixing broken pay systems is now more important than ever. If you are a public servant and you’re not a Prospect member, now is the time to join.

If you are a member, you can get more involved in the campaign – just fill in our short form.

Garry Graham is our Deputy General Secretary covering the public services sector.